Lists & Articles

Pornography Trichotomy

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Anytime the cult media distributor Vinegar Syndrome advertises an online sale, I immediately start perusing the offerings on their sister site Méluisne, where they’re also selling discounted Blu-rays of vintage pornography. Since most streaming services won’t touch hardcore titles of any quality, the only legal way to access most Golden Age pornos is to collect them on physical media, which makes Mélusine an irresistible siren during sales. That’s not to say that Vinegar Syndrome’s work restoring vintage horror schlock like Nightbeast, Demonwarp, Devil Fetus, or The Suckling is any less important than their restoration of retro pornos, but there’s something about the physical-media-only exclusivity of Mélusine’s library that routinely has me reaching for my wallet. It’s highly plausible that I could catch up with an Italo horror relic like Burial Ground on Tubi one day, for instance, while the same can’t be said for the hardcore cuts of titles like SexWorld, Blonde Ambition, or Pandora’s Mirror. So, during Vinegar Syndrome’s recent “Halfway to Black Friday” sale, I picked up a trio of Golden Age pornos to add to my personal schlock pile simply because they were discounted and looked interesting. As a group, the movies ultimately didn’t have much in common besides their shared X rating, their early-80s premiere dates, and their universal inclusion of a gentle lovemaking scene on the carpet in front of a fireplace. Individually, however, I found them taxonomically clarifying in the way they identify three distinct modes of traditional pornographic storytelling: the expected collection of standalone sex scenes that became an industry standard in the VHS era, the saga of absurd letters-to-the-editor sexual fantasies you’ll find in stereotypically airheaded pornos, and the shockingly thoughtful & tragic dramas that are too much of a bummer for you to imagine anyone actually getting off to them despite all of the exposed & penetrated flesh.

1981’s Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle was the directorial debut of its titular star, who makes direct eye contact with her audience while inviting us along to indulge her hottest sexual fantasies, one at a time. Sprinkle starts the picture pouring a glass of wine under the candelabra lighting of her living room piano, then shows the audience childhood photos from her life before the industry, when loved ones knew her as Ellen. After this photo album nostalgia trip, the camera pans over to a fireplace that’s been cropped just outside the frame, where two naked men are arm wrestling on the carpet as foreplay, waiting for Sprinkle to use their bodies. She quickly obliges, guiding the audience through her individual fantasies as she fucks new scene partners in every room of the house, narrating instructive demos for novelty sex acts like tit jobs, golden showers, and prostate play. The one-on-one intimacy of this non-narrative hangout would become much more common in the home video era that would soon snuff out the industry’s Porno Chic boom. In order to properly break the fourth wall, Sprinkle has to film herself instigating an orgy in the rows of a 42nd Street movie theater, exciting the audience with the fantasy that she might sit next to us at any time. It’s more an elaborately mediated act of mutual masturbation than it is a proper Golden Age porno, which has only become more standard and more direct in the modern era where performers can now interact with their audience in real time on video chat sites like OnlyFans. Sprinkle’s early prototype for that modern porno template—wherein narrative has been excised in favor of stringing together a collection of standalone sexual stunts—is still heavily scripted, though, and it includes such delightful cornball dialogue as, “Do you like big tits? Well, as you may have noticed, I have rather larger ones.” It’s just a nice, holesome hangout with our good friend Annie, who would later push its interactive format to much more psychedelic extremes in the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop, an all-timer in pornographic video art.

You can tell Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle was ahead of the curve in its audience-interactive intimacy by watching the bonus features for Neon Nights, which was also released in 1981. While providing commentary for a reel of unused outtakes, Neon Nights director Cecil Howard calls attention to the shots where Kandi Barbour makes direct eye contact with the camera during her own fireplace lovemaking scene, which had to be trimmed as a result. Neon Nights is much more traditionally narrative than Deep Inside, following the hitchhiking adventures of a horny runaway teen (Lysa Thatcher). That’s not to say Howard’s movie is better behaved than Sprinkle’s, though. It starts with Jamie Gillis fisting that teenage runaway’s mother while the teen listens intently from the opposite side of her bedroom wall, brushing her hair & practicing her makeup before using her beauty instruments as makeshift dildos. She decides to hit the road when her stepfather hits on her the next morning, in one of two scenes that reference the infamous shower stabbing sequence from Hitchcock’s Psycho. The horrors continue on the road, where she encounters swinger magicians who make her levitate out of bed like Linda Blair, an unscrupulous nude photographer who likes to fuck on a bed of porcelain babydolls, and a dreamworld doppelganger for her creepy stepfather that she’s much more willing to sleep with. Neon Nights is one of the few movies where you’re grateful for a last-minute “It was all just a dream reveal,” since it recontextualizes a series of seemingly nonconsensual sex acts as the incoherent fantasies of a young woman who doesn’t know what she wants. More importantly, it’s an instructive look at the thin border that separated horror & pornographic filmmaking sensibilities in its era — two disreputable genres that were culturally dismissed for their shared cheapness & prurience. The runaway’s far-out sexual exploits are often set to the spooky theremin sounds of a sci-fi soundtrack. Veronica Hart’s sex scene among her babydoll collection is frequently punctuated by flashes of lightning to accentuate the taboo. Much like many dirt-cheap horror titles of its time, Neon Nights would make for an excellent classroom tool to demonstrate how simple lighting & color scheme choices (from the titular neon hues of a motel sign to the more porno-specific contrast of a pink-flushed face pressed against a lime green bedspread) can make even cheapest sets look fantastic … if it weren’t for all of the vigorous onscreen penetration that would alienate most students. It’s also just a very silly story about a teenage hitchhiker’s letters-to-the-editor sexual fantasies, nakedly so.

When most modern audiences picture a narrative porno, they’ll think of outlandish fluff like Neon Nights, wherein a hitchhiker’s road trip storyline is used as a flimsy excuse to connect a series of standalone goofy sex scenes, even if artfully staged. There was a brief time, however, when Porno Chic features were thought to have a “crossover” commercial appeal and, thus, were expected to be populated by real characters with real emotional crises that could be resolved dramatically instead of pornographically. 1982’s Roommates (directed by Chuck Vincent) is the rare hardcore title that leers harder at women’s internal lives than their external ones, the kind of Golden Era porno that’s so dramatically heavy that it’s difficult to imagine anyone being turned on by it. Samantha Fox, Veronica Hart, and Kelly Nichols star a trio of young professionals sharing rent in a New York City apartment while struggling to break into the entertainment industry. Fox is eager to get into movie production work but is professionally haunted by her previous career as a callgirl; Hart is getting her feet wet as an off-Broadway stage actor but is caught between the affections of her seemingly gay costar and her older, married drama teacher; Nichols is a fashion model whose escalating drug addiction leaves her vulnerable to creeps & stalkers (most notably Jamie Gillis, again playing to type). All three women are on the verge of thriving, with only the universal problem of men being disgusting getting in the way of their success. As a result, most of the sex they have along the way is intentionally, uncomfortably bad — tainted by coercion, extortion, intoxication, and abuse. It’s the only professional porno I’ve ever seen where women immediately disengage from oral sex to spit in disgust, once in a toilet and another time onto the trousers of a reviled colleague. It’s also the only professional porno I’ve seen that convincingly stages actual, recognizably human arguments instead of bouts of belligerent shouting (give or take Andy Milligan’s Fleshpot on 42nd Street). It’s as heavy on dialogue as it is short on sex, to the point where even its obligatory fireplace lovemaking scene is staged in front of the punier flame of several candles instead of the real deal. As a result, it’s the only title out of this trio that could be convincingly passed off as “a real movie” to most discerning audiences, which is a designation that’s often saved for pornos that are too dramatically upsetting to function as a genuine turn-on.

Obviously, the major cinematic draw of these vintage porno titles is the opportunity to see extreme images no other filmic genre would dare show onscreen. There is no shortage of those extreme moments in Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle, but I think I was most surprised by the infinite angles & configurations Sprinkle (along with uncredited co-director Joe Sarno) came up with to capture the action of Ron Jeremy’s hardon sliding between her “rather large” breasts. On the opposite end of the dramatic-pornographic spectrum, Roommates thought to include representation of cis women huffing poppers on a nightclub dancefloor, a salacious pastime that has become something of a trend among young partygoers in recent years but has obviously been in practice for decades. The real standout moment to me, however, is a scene from Neon Nights where actress Arcadia Lake is painting a giant cock on her home easel while actively masturbating between brushstrokes, which is just about as honest of a depiction of artistic process as I’ve ever seen in cinema. While cheap-o horror schlock and other disreputable genres have gradually been legitimized as worthy cultural artifacts, vintage porno is still a niche beat for professional critics & academics to cover, if it’s touched on at all. Since sexual fantasy is just as integral to human life and cinematic expression as any other natural impulse, it’s a shame that it has so little room for discussion or exhibition in the modern discourse, while half a century ago it was being covered by outlets like Variety and The New York Times. Even as someone who already values this kind of cultural runoff, I’m struggling to not make qualitative judgements about the naked titillation tactics of Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle or the daffy daydream fantasies of Neon Nights against the more somber downbeats of Roommates, which earns instant respectability by undercutting its own eroticism. I’ll need to watch more vintage pornography to work on that. In fact, all serious cinephiles should be watching more pornography of all varieties, the more outdated the better. There’s much left to interrogate & discuss, while most avenues of vintage horror discourse have already been exhausted well past their dead ends.

-Brandon Ledet

Programming Maisie

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Last year, after watching The Blue Gardenia and being particularly taken with Ann Sothern in it, I looked her up and discovered that, over the course of eight years, she had starred in ten(!) films as a character named Maisie Ravier, a misadventuring showgirl. Those ten films are largely forgotten now, but I found all of them on Russia’s YouTube equivalent as uploaded VHS rips from Turner Classic Movies airings, and I dutifully archived them for this year with the intent of watching them all and writing about them for something I intended to call “Maisie May.”

Maisie May extended beyond the reach of the actual calendar month, but we still had a good time, didn’t we? In wrapping up these hours spent with Ann Sothern, I figured it would be best to do a ranking of the Maisie series, from worst to best. There’s virtually zero continuity within these films, so you can really pick up any of them at random. In a discussion that we had on a recent episode of the podcast, Brandon posited that these films would fit in easily as “programmers,” the kind of thing one would plug into an empty space in a screening event or programming block that could easily fit a broad theme. In that spirit, here comes Maisie, with recommendations for pairings. 

10. Congo Maisie

Easily the worst of the bunch. Should not be programmed outside of an academic setting about casual racism in Hollywood history, alongside Birth of a Nation and Crash. 

9. Maisie Gets Her Man

Below par. Sothern gets pushed to the side to make room for big name costar Red Skelton, who does a series of bits that are so awkwardly unfunny that time seems to stand still. Picks up once the intrigue of the plot starts to set in, but it’ll be far too late in the runtime for most to perk up about it. 

Series: Red Skelton Red-trospective, as the finale following Merton of the Movies and Whistling in the Dark. 

8. Gold Rush Maisie

A decent but somewhat middling effort, an attempt to cash in on both the recent publication of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and the John Ford film adaptation thereof, coming out the very same year as the latter. Some charming performances from child actors, and Maisie’s conflict with the grumpy ghost town dwellers is a nice treat. Nothing to write home about. 

Series: The Dust Bowl, between The Grapes of Wrath, naturally, and Paper Moon. 

7. Ringside Maisie

Maisie finds herself employed as the companion of an elderly woman who doesn’t know that her son is making his money as a boxer. The story’s a little thin, but Maisie gets the opportunity to shine regardless, and it’s an unexpected twist that the decent girlfriend of the lead turns out to be a heel. Sothern has great chemistry with her real-life husband in what I believe is the only production they ever shared. 

Series: Let’s Get Ready to Rrrrrrumble, as the second feature following Body and Soul and preceding Raging Bull.

6. Maisie

The film in which we first meet our beloved heroine. The story beats in this nontraditional comic Western appear, retroactively, to be tired, but it’s only because the later films would lift bits: the unfaithful woman, the sudden appearance of an unexpected suicide (or an attempt thereof), Maisie settling down at the end with a man and a fortune, neither of which will ever be seen again. There’s a reason that there were so many sequels, though, and it’s because Ann Sothern really is just that charming. 

Series: How the West Was Fun, sandwiched between City Slickers and Support Your Local Sheriff!

5. Maisie Was a Lady

A fun little romp wherein we find Maisie in the employ of some mopey rich folks. She charms her way into everyone’s hearts, gives a father a dressing down for trying to fill the void he left in his children’s lives with money, and saves an ingenue from being taken advantage of by a philandering hanger-on. Good stuff. 

Series: Maid to Love You, at the top of the bill, followed by Diary of a Chambermaid and Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills.

4. Undercover Maisie

In her final screen outing, Maisie joins the LAPD as an undercover officer with the division that investigates scams and con artists. She flunks her first mission but refuses to give up, resulting in her being taken captive by a trio of criminals and forcing her to use all her wits to break free. Suffers a little for being too much like Maisie Goes to Reno in some of its broader elements, and one of the weaker romance plots for this stronger back half of the series. Fun, but not the strongest way to end the series. 

Series: Legendary Legal Ladies, sandwiched between Miss Congeniality and Yes, Madam!

3. Maisie Goes to Reno

Maisie, overworking herself in the war effort, develops a facial tic that causes her to wink at inopportune times, earning her a prescription for some time off. She decides to spend it in Reno working as an entertainer, but a promise to a young soldier leads her to stumble onto a plot to manipulate the soldier’s wife into a divorce, so that the new divorcee can be bled dry by her business partners. Maisie goes all out in trying to save a stranger’s marriage.

Series: Reno Divorcees, as the comedic breather between The Women and Desert Hearts.

2. Swing Shift Maisie

Maisie almost meets her match in conniving would-be actress Iris (Jean Rogers), while also documenting what women helping in the war effort did in their downtime and acting as a subliminal OSHA-esque reminder about protective equipment in the workplace. 

Series: B&W Women And War, alongside The Cranes are Flying and Millions Like Us. 

1. Up Goes Maisie

Maisie finally gets involved in some real espionage! It’s corporate espionage, sure, but it still counts. Maisie’s love interest du jour is the inventor of a helicopter that can be operated as easily as a car, but one of the men on his crew is in collaboration to steal the prototype and fake its destruction. Maisie gets drugged at her engagement party and does a high dive in her clothes, and by the end of the film she’s flying the sweetest miniature of retro futurist helicopter that you ever saw like she was born for the skies. An utter delight.

Series: Fantastic Aviatrices, as the lead up to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, followed by Nausicaa. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Chinese Torture Chamber Stories

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Usually, when someone describes a movie as “torture porn,” they’re not being literal. The term is largely pejorative, wielded to shame & insult a crop of aughts-era horror thrillers that found pornographic satisfaction in torturing buxom young women under grimy fluorescent lights. The genre’s tone is decidedly unsexy, as it has been gradually understood as a subconscious expression of culture-wide discomfort with the US’s torturous interrogation tactics in the post-9/11 days of the War on Terror. It’s important, then, to distinguish 1994’s A Chinese Torture Chamber Story and its 1998 sequel as literal torture porn: overt attempts to titillate their audience through leering depictions of traditional Chinese torture techniques, repackaged into the sleek production values of 90s-era erotic thrillers. Unlike the accidental torture porn of the following decade, the Chinese Torture Chamber Stories are also very direct in their expression of horror with the governmental interrogation tactics of mainland China, voiced from the somewhat safe distance of British-ruled Hong Kong. So, while the cowardly Saw & Hostel hid their own queasy arousal with real-life torture victims of the American justice system under several layers of artificial, dramatic remove, A Chinese Torture Chamber I & II were bravely upfront about being simultaneously icked out & turned on by their own nation’s cruel & unusual tactics for beating “the truth” out of the accused.

The first Chinese Torture Chamber Story is structured like an especially crass episode of Law & Order, with a pair of accused adulterers standing trial under the duress of an arcane legal system. Before the 19th Century court, a poor chamber maid (Yvonne Yung) pleads for a panel of judges to believe that she did not sleep with her wealthy employer (Lawrence Ng) behind his wife’s back, nor did she conspire to kill her own husband (Tommy Wong) so that she could run away with said master in full adulterous sin. In flashbacks, we discover that she is telling the truth. In fact, she has been a victim all her life, from being effectively sold into sexual slavery as a potential concubine for her master, to being married off to a potentially violent husband as punishment for supposedly tempting said master, to being punished by a panel of judges for acts of adultery & murder she never actually committed. In the eyes of the law, however, she is guilty until proven innocent, so the audience is subjected to watching her get spanked, beaten, and lacerated in the present, between dramatic scenes proving her innocence in the past. This archaic interrogation might be interpreted as a political statement against the effectiveness of torture as a method of extracting a truthful confession out the accused, who mostly just wants the pain to stop, but in practice it’s played as an excuse to stage nonconsensual S&M acts for a disturbed, horny audience — starting with a bare-bottomed public spanking to set the tone.

What you might not gather from that plot recap is that A Chinese Torture Chamber Story is a largely goofy slapstick comedy. The husband our poor handmaiden is married off to is introduced as another punishment for her supposed adultery, because he’s known to have a comically oversized penis that would physically harm any woman who attempts intercourse with him. When his timid bride finds him to be a tender soul and lovingly jacks him off from behind in a show of good will, the scene is played as a ZAZ-style parody of the pottery wheel scene from Ghost, complete with an Easternized remix of “Unchained Melody.” Her master also gets into over-the-top sexual mishaps while traveling away from home, most notably in a sequence where he meets a married pair of wuxia warriors, who perform violently athletic acts of wizard sex while flying through the treetops the same way most wuxia movies stage their sword fights. Any tonal seriousness elsewhere is a result of the extremity in the gore, which simulates historically accurate torture tactics involving chopped legs, pulled fingernails, crushed breasts, castration, and ritualistic penetration. Even those gross-out gore gags can be oddly humorous despite their heinous cruelty, though, never more so than in the opening credits sequence, which deploys the stock Wilhelm Scream sound effect a good dozen times before we even get to the title card. The movie wants you to squirm in discomfort, to squirm even harder in arousal, and to have a good laugh at its cartoon antics, all at the same time. It’s an all-timer cinematic feat in cognitive dissonance.

The 1998 sequel A Chinese Torture Chamber Story II falls much more solidly in-line with what an audience would expect from literal torture porn of this sort. Again, we are bearing witness to the ritualistic torture of a young woman accused of adultery & murder (Yolinda Yam), but in this case, she is guilty of the crime. In flashback, we learn the ways that her murder of an empire official (Mark Ho-nam Cheng)—whose entire job appears to be ritualistic torture of political dissidents—is morally justified. We meet her in a peasant village where her fiancée is hoping to earn enough money to one day make their marriage official, which opens the young couple up to a dangerous love triangle with a traveling warrior they find impressive in skill & social stature. The warrior’s potential to cuckold every small-town yokel who admires him is initially treated as a source of erotic intrigue, playing out like a mildly naughty Skinemax thriller with sweaty bouts of marital copulation relieving the tension. That hero worship quickly sours, however, when the noble warrior gets his puppy-dog devotees jobs in the local torture chamber, where they are horrified by the violent acts he emotionlessly performs as if he’s filing paperwork. Once his cold, villainous soul is revealed to the audience, he is free to commit horrific acts of sexual violence against his new employee’s wives, plunging the audience into a tonal ice bath that couldn’t differ further from the goofball boner comedy of the first movie in the series. We’re happy to see him killed.

The second Chinese Torture Chamber Story is a lot less playfully zany then the first one, which makes it difficult to recommend even to most schlock genre nerds. It’s strictly for freaks only. Still, it’s got such a psychologically fucked up villain that’s it proves to be a compelling watch in its own grimy way. At the very least, it’s the movie of the pair that more convincingly delivers on the “torture” qualifier of the “torture porn” designation, which is meaningful in a genre where the “porn” can never go past softcore. As exceedingly violent as Category III Hong Kong sex thrillers can be, their onscreen sexual activity is relatively tame compared to the hardcore pornos of America’s golden age. Characters will connect at the pelvis in sexual bliss, but there is no visible thrusting in that lower hemisphere; they can only heave their chests to simulate sexual motion. The screen can be overloaded with boobs & butts, but penises are only represented in veiled silhouette, except in nonsexual scenarios where they are separated from the body in elaborately violent acts of castration. The most onscreen sexual activity you’ll find in the Chinese Torture Chamber Stories is when the sex is at its most violence, as in when a comically gigantic penis literally explodes in a geyser of blood or when a character mimes forced fellatio on a magically invisible man. As literal torture porn, these movies are decidedly in bad taste, but they are also gorgeously staged acts of bad taste with surprising jolts of juvenile humor frequently interrupting their act of extreme sadism. The same cannot be said for American torture porn of the early aughts, which is just as dull tonally as it is visually & artistically.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #267: What Dreams May Come (1998) & The Afterlife

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Welcome to Episode #267 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of films set in the afterlife, starting with the 1998 Robin Williams vehicle What Dreams May Come.

00:00 Welcome
03:48 The Furious (2026)
07:22 A History of Violence (2005)
15:57 Blood Knot (1995)
24:34 Prince

35:27 What Dreams May Come (1998)
59:45 A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
1:15:17 Defending Your Life (1991)
1:31:17 After Life (1998)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Lagniappe Podcast: Leather Jacket Love Story (1998)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss David DeCoteau’s uncharacteristically sincere romance drama Leather Jacket Love Story (1998).

00:00 Spacecon
14:55 Masters of the Universe (2026)
22:31 Swing Shift Maisie (1943)
26:00 Maisie Goes to Reno (1944)
31:20 All the President’s Men (1976)
35:55 Ministry of Fear (1944)
40:31 Die Nibelungen – Kriemhild’s Revenge (1924)
45:40 Blades of the Guardians (2026)
50:30 Ramekin (2018)
58:07 The Doll (1962)
1:01:55 Across the Hall (2009)
1:08:15 The Currents (2026)
1:11:45 Relic (2020)
1:16:40 Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round (2026)

1:21:14 Leather Jacket Love Story (1998)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Sand on the Glass, Leaf in the Pitt

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A good friend recently lent me a DVD compilation of experimental short films from animator Caroline Leaf, titled Out on a Limb. He kept excitingly telling me that Leaf primarily works with a “sand on glass” animation technique, which I struggled to understand in the abstract. In retrospect, the term is pretty self-explanatory. Instead of working with the ink-on-paper or clay-on-wire or code-on-computer techniques of more popular animation styles (hand-drawn, stop-motion, and CG, respectively), Leaf made a name for herself on the 1970s art scene by producing short films entirely animated in beach sand. She’d spread her collected sand across an illuminated table, shaping it to represent all figures & settings captured by the camera. The technique was not entirely novel to her heyday, having been used as a texturing effect at least as far back as Lotte Reiniger’s 1926 landmark The Adventures of Prince Achmed (largely cited as the oldest surviving animated feature film). Leaf was among the first animators to utilize sand-on-glass animation as her primary medium, however, like a chef who only cooks potatoes or a guitarist who works only in arpeggio; it was an experiment in technical limitation.

It turns out, you can do a lot with the simple manipulation of light & sand. In her early experiments “Peter and the Wolf” (1969) & “The Owl Who Married a Goose” (1976), Leaf finds a freedom from the tyranny of setting & geography in her animated sandscapes. Those folktales are retold in a white, boundaryless void where figures transform from one animal to another as the story demands. The wolves, owls, geese, and children drawn in fine-grain beach sand often lose any & all distinctions between their differing animal bodies, turning into and maneuvering around each other in surreal configurations that would be impossible in any other medium. However, her sand-on-glass project didn’t reach its apotheosis until she adapted Franz Kafka’s most famous novella in the 1977 short “The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa.” Her Metamorphosis adaptation is the exact existential bug-transformation crisis you know & love, with the same anything-can-transform-into-anything surrealism of her previous shorts, except with the added limitation of having to actually depict a physical, closed-off setting. It’s her most claustrophobic work in sand-on-glass animation as a result, but its claustrophobic tension is entirely appropriate to the text it illustrates. There’s a muddied, charcoal-drawing style smear to her technique that emphasizes the story’s inherent grime while drawing comparisons between the artist’s solitary production style and her character’s pathetic, socially isolating plight. You cannot fully lose yourself in the story of The Metamorphosis, since the literal fingerprints of the artist conveying it are visible in every gritty frame.

While Leaf did explore other animation techniques, her most recognizable & influential works were rendered in beach sand, to the point where her name is near synonymous with the technique. At least, she was on my mind when diving into the collection of short films animated by Suzan Pitt that are currently hosted on The Criterion Channel. In Pitt’s 2006 short “El Doctor,” her titular hand-drawn doctor ends a drunken bender by hallucinating in the driver’s seat of his car outside a Mexican pub. His blurred vision is overpowered by a gigantic sea creature chasing a man in his impossibly bright windshield, an image illustrated in Leaf’s signature sand-on-glass technique. Later, when the same doctor is visited by an angel, Leaf illustrates the supernatural encounter by scratching that angel directly into the celluloid to accentuate the uncanniness of its image. Notably, this scratching technique was also a favorite got-to for Caroline Leaf’s later career, after she had abandoned beach sand as her primary medium of choice. It’s unclear whether Caroline Leaf was on Suzan Pitt’s mind when making “El Doctor,” but she was certainly on the top of mine while watching it.

Like Caroline Leaf, Suzan Pitt started her animation career with a distinct trademark style before moving on to experiment with other techniques & textures in later works. Her most formidable shorts “Crocus” (1971), “Asparagus” (1979), and “Joy Street” (1995) all reflect her fine-art background as a painter, literalizing the “every frame a painting” cinematic cliché. Pitt would paint her figures on traditional transparent animation cells against a black velvet-style backdrop, but the level of color & detail in her psychedelic fantasy realms far outpaced what you’ll find in the commercial end of the medium. She’s also unconventionally morose for an animator, centering all three of those works on the madness, loneliness, and despair of women isolated in dissatisfying domestic spaces, staring out their windows at the big, scary world outside. In “Crocus,” a woman performs mundane domestic duties like child-rearing, self-primping, and marital sex while occasionally taking breaks to stare out the window and dream of a freer life. In “Asparagus,” a woman struggles to make sense of the alien world outside her window but finds a way to repackage it as a psychedelic stage act for the delight of a bewildered theatre audience. In “Joy Street,” a woman stares at the desolate street life below her window before slitting her own wrists, and is then revived by Fleischer style cartoon characters who relocate her limp body to a Technicolor jungle outside city. All three films feel like funhouse mirror distortions of a lonely, dissatisfied artist’s diary, just as confessional as they are inscrutable, grotesque, and beautiful.

These experiments in form are most compelling in a multimedia approach, something Pitt was aware of early in her career. When her faceless onscreen surrogate puts on a surreal theatrical performance at the climax of “Asparagus,” her audience is rendered in a crude Claymation technique, further alienating the artist from the rest of her fellow citizenry. By the time she incorporated the sand-on-glass and scratched celluloid techniques from Leaf’s work in “El Doctor,” Pitt had already established an anything-goes approach to her animations, incorporating paper dolls, magazine collage, and live actors into her signature fine-art painting style. While Leaf is best known for her work with sand, she also reached her greatest artistic heights when expanding her approach to multimedia techniques — most notably in “Interview,” a short film collaboration with fellow animator Veronika Soul. “Interview” is a dual portrait of the two artists at work, vulnerably gushing about each other and confessing their own personal insecurities while excitedly jumping from one experimental animation technique to the next. It’s the closest I’ve ever seen any filmmaker come to approximating Agnès Varda’s free-flowing autofictional documentary style with any convincing success, and it took two filmmakers working in tandem to accomplish it. It’s also the most I feel like I got to know Caroline Leaf through the content her films, since so much of her most prominent work is more about technique than about personal expression. In contrast, Suzan Pitt lays bare the ugliest, most intimate parts of her own psyche in her signature animations, daring the audience not to look away. Both artists have trapped themselves in an isolating, labor-intensive medium that requires them to work alone in a dark room for untold hours; the difference is largely in whether the proverbial door to that room is locked shut or left open for the audience peer in.

-Brandon Ledet

David Bradley’s Silent Monsters

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The single-screen microcinema Zeitgeist Theatre & Lounge has been hosting weekly silent movie screenings with live piano accompaniment every Sunday afternoon for months now. I know this because I happened to see a flyer for the series while catching another movie there. While other local repertory series like Prytania’s Classic Movies and The Broad’s Gap Tooth program are regularly well attended, Zeitgeist’s Silent Films series feels like an open secret, a kind of backroom speakeasy version of local theatrical programming. The vibe in the room can be electric, as pianist David Bradley’s live, semi-improvised movie scores add an immediacy to century-old relics like Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last! that wouldn’t earn nearly as big of laughs or gasps streaming alone at home with a canned soundtrack. It can also be remarkably intimate, echoing the spirit of a D.I.Y. punk show whenever Bradley finds himself playing to a near empty room, engaging his audience in conversation and asking for help wheeling his instrument into the theatre. These are live concerts after all, even more so than they are movie screenings, with all of the fluctuating charm & chaos that distinction suggests.

The reason I got such a wide sample of live-concert experiences at Zeitgeist’s Silent Films showings is that Bradley’s weekly programming veered hard into my personal interests last month, in a series he titled “Silent Monster May.” In the immediate days after I had fallen in love with the century-old romance horror of Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera (1925), Bradley announced that he’d be exclusively screening silent horror movies that month, including a precursor to Chaney’s Phantom in the 1923 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I hit all three screenings in the “Silent Monster May” series, which varied in attendance & intensity but were consistently high quality. Before live-scoring 1920’s Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Bradley mentioned that he hadn’t seen the movie in a while and doesn’t like to overprepare before showtimes, choosing instead to react and respond in real time along with the audience. His silent movie soundtracks are rolling moodsetters that emotionally ebb & flow along with the action onscreen, which in the case of “Silent Monster May” meant accentuating the pitiable romance & tragedy of horror cinema’s earliest monsters.

The most pitiable monsters in the program were also the most famous, both penned by French literary hero Victor Hugo. Lon Chaney’s aforementioned hunchback, Quasimodo, is ugly-cute like a scraggly stray dog. He lusts after the Romani bombshell Esmeralda while playing voyeur from the upper tiers of Notre Dame’s ornate walls, occasionally descending to join in her community’s orgiastic parties so he can watch her dance along with her other, handsomer suitors. The Hunchback of Notre Dame gets a little sleepy in the middle stretch whenever Esmeralda indulges in romantic flings outside of Quasimodo’s’ crooked view, but Chaney is dependably entertaining as the lovelorn monster in every scene which he appears. Not only is “The Man of a Thousand Faces” notoriously talented at transforming himself through rudimentary prosthetics, but he also proves to be an impressive stunt performer here; he crawls all over the church’s exterior walls and hangs upside down from the ropes of its ringing bells like an impish Tom Cruise with wagging tongue & protruding eye. He is, unquestionably, a silent horror movie star, and he carries that burden on his bulging, knotted shoulder with apparent ease.

1928’s The Man Who Laughs also presented a kind of silent-horror celebrity, although one associated less with an actor than with pop-culture IP. Conrad Veidt’s titular laughing man is most famous for having inspired the design for Batman’s arch nemesis, The Joker, which would be immediately apparent to any modern audience who catches a glimpse of his Glasgow smile. Paul Leni’s post-German Expressionist adaptation of Hugo’s novel says less about comic books than it does about the ever-evolving history of Universal horror movies, though. Since they’re no longer considered scary, the modern take on Universal’s famous monsters is that they’re tragic figures, sympathetic victims of society’s ills. The Man Who Laughs didn’t waste any time waiting around for that reclamation; the laughing man’s only monstrous quality is a surgical disfigurement that makes him look extremely friendly, however grotesque. Its circus-carny setting (the only place a permanently smiling abomination could find work) also positions it as a softer, kinder version of Freaks, which Tod Browning would soon direct for MGM. Like every monster in this series, he’s just looking for love, but the world around him is too cruel to allow it. It wouldn’t even qualify as a monster movie at all if it weren’t for the disturbing intensity of Conrad Veidt’s facial contortions, which he intentionally undercuts by reflecting deep wells of pain from behind his watery eyes.

Because the legends of Lon Chaney and The Joker came with their own pre-packaged expectations, I was most impressed by the 1920 adaptation of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, which is saddled with a much lighter load of modern scholarship & hype. Admittedly, it’s been several decades since I last read its Robert Louis Stevenson source material, but I don’t remember quite so much of the original Jekyll & Hyde novel being set in a strip club & brothel, so the silent movie version largely took me by surprise. John Barrymore plays the virtuous Dr. Jekyll, whose future father-in-law and other colleagues find unnerving for his high morals and buttoned-up demeanor. So, they drag him to the local house of pleasure to catch a glimpse of the real him and, thus, trigger his first ever crisis of conscience. Jekyll doesn’t especially enjoy feeling adulterous lust for the first time in his life, so he invents the mad-scientist concoction that separates his monstrous impulses into the dastardly doppelganger Mr. Hyde. It’s a continually relatable story about the fact that there’s a lecherous pervert lurking in all of us, desperate to claw its way out at the slightest wayward temptation. As a result, it’s not only a great monster movie but also a great strip club movie, placing its dual nature early in the lineages of both Striptease and The Substance — the full Demi Moore spectrum.

All of these vintage monster flicks are highly demanding on the modern attention span, but well worth the effort. The color-tinted frames that distinguish their interior-exterior settings (like the pink hue of Jekyll’s brothel and the cold blue of Hyde’s moonlight strolls) and the massive scale of their crowd scenes (like the castle-storming sequence of Hunchback, wherein Quasimodo scalds the crowds below with vats of molten lead) are remarkably, inextricably cinematic for an artform that was still working to distinguish itself from the moods & methods of stage theatre. You just have to put down your smartphone long enough to witness them. Even with the distracting sounds of traffic, parties, and general urbanite mayhem occasionally audible through Zeitgeist’s theater walls, it’s much easier to lock into the wavelengths of these cinematic relics than it would be at home, especially with the guiding hand of a live piano score reacting to each scene’s emotional gearshifts in real time. If you have any interest in silent era cinema, there’s no better way to experience its old-world magic in New Orleans than to keep up with David Bradley’s microcinema concerts. I’ll be returning to them soon myself, and I’ll hopefully meet more classic movie monsters along the way.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #265: Chess of the Wind (1976) & The World Cinema Project

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Welcome to Episode #265 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a selection of films that have been restored by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, starting with the Iranian familial thriller Chess of the Wind (1976).

00:00 Welcome
02:11 Obsession (2026)
09:09 Microcosmos (1996)
18:42 The Housemaid (2025)
25:55 Maya Deren

32:54 The World Cinema Project
41:09 Chess of the Wind (1976)
1:09:39 Lucía (1968)
1:33:58 The Night of Counting the Years (1969)
1:51:01 Manila in the Claws of Light (1975)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

On the Ethics of Piracy

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My local video store is run as a non-profit, and one of their ongoing community projects is to offer a window display residency. Artists submit their design concepts, and award recipients get the opportunity to actualize their ideas. Right now, that display is a testament to film piracy: 

Unless you’re a real cinemaniac, you’ve probably never seen Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a bizarre forty-three-minute cult film created in 1987 by Todd Haynes. In it, the strife between Karen Carpenter and her (according to the semi-biographical film) controlling brother Richard plays out, with all characters being portrayed by Barbie dolls. Memorably, Karen’s worsening health due to her anorexia is demonstrated by her doll being slowly whittled away. If you have seen Superstar, then the only reason you’ve ever had the opportunity to do so was through piracy. Whether because the use of Barbies does not fall under fair use, because of the presence of contemporary music that is unlicensed, or just because Richard Carpenter raised a big enough stink about it, there’s no way for you to watch this film legally. A copy exists at the Museum of Modern Art, but it is not exhibited. I personally have seen it, and the copy that I watched was on a burned bootleg Maxell DVD-R just like the one recreated in Maura Murnane’s display above. 

The question of the ethics of piracy arose recently when I texted Brandon about whether or not we (read: I) should cover the leaked film Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender, a continuation of the animated 2005-2008 Nickelodeon series Avatar: The Last Airbender, following the show’s child characters into young adulthood (some of them had also appeared as elderly characters in continuation series The Legend of Korra). AATLA was set to be released theatrically this year, but Paramount opted to pull the film from its planned cinema release and drop it solely to their streaming service, Paramount+. This announced change ruffled some feathers. Fans who wanted to see the film on the big screen and would have happily paid to do so would now have to sign up for a subscription service to see it, and at a reduced scale than the creators intended; members of the crew and animation teams were likewise disappointed to learn that something that had been created to be visually stunning and grand in scope would not get the opportunity to reach the intended audience. Universally, the decision to paywall the film in the winter was met with criticism. Avatar fans who want to have access to that content are more likely to already be subscribed to Paramount+ in the first place, meaning that the addition of the film to the service would likely have a negligible effect on overall subscription numbers. The money was already spent, there would be no chance for the film to recoup its budget theatrically, and the hellscape that is the current streaming service subscription model grinds on. 

In general, although Swampflix and its contributors in no uncertain terms do not recommend piracy, as a legal disclaimer, I’m flexible about what this means for works that are inaccessible due to rights-holders’ choices and decisions. Consolidation of the ownership of all media into a few conglomerates is a bad thing. Even the least cinemanic among us have cottoned on to the fact that every streaming service is less functional, robust, and egalitarian they they once were, and the national government’s antipathy against monopoly prosecution in the death throes of our current economic era mean that it’s only going to get worse. The next inbound round of money-laundering square-dancing means that next year the guy who makes your toothpaste might also own The Little Rascals, or that every time you buy corn chips you’ll be adding a nickel to an account that will eventually fund a live-action Rocko’s Modern Life, or that some anarchocapitalist’s nepotistically inherited pyramid scheme will get to decide whether you can make Dorothy Gale’s slippers ruby or not. The back catalogs of films that are gatekept behind faceless entities are held back not so that said entities can do something with them, but just to keep others from having access. 

Or, more frequently in recent years, to cancel huge, completed projects because not releasing them to the public means that they can be written off for tax purposes. It’s far from the worst thing that most of the 1% has done, but like most of their unethical actions, it’s rooted in the seed of all evil: a love of money. A couple hundred internet malcontents with too much time on their hands managed to leverage a global pandemic into browbeating Warner Brothers into releasing a supposed “lost” film at a time when productions were shut down. This emboldened probably the worst people it could have, but it also means that nothing is really set in stone. Three years after its cancellation was announced, Coyote vs. Acme is finally being released this August; maybe there’s even some hope that Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah’s Batgirl might see the light of day someday. But as Brandon pointed out to me when I texted him, there wasn’t really a good reason to review the animated Avatar film when it had a real scheduled release date, even if its release was a downgrade. That’s a different story.

I won’t reveal the circumstances under which I viewed Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender. Maybe someone was screening it at a bar, a bar that has since closed down and therefore no one can be held responsible. Maybe I watched it through a storefront window like a kid in a corny Christmas commercial. Maybe someone burned a bunch of copies onto Memorex DVD-Rs and let them fall off of the back of a truck. A full review will come, when the film is legally available. I would recommend that, should the winds change and you get the chance to see it theatrically, it will be well worth the cost of the ticket. As to whether it will be worth the cost of the subscription to Paramount+, only you, dear reader, know if you’re responsible enough to cancel before the renewal date if Avatar Aang is all that you want to see. I’m not entirely sold on the new voice cast (in short, Toph is pretty good, Katara is acceptable, Aang is iffy but occasionally perfect, and—all love and respect to Steven Yeun—Zuko is completely wrong), but the film is absolutely gorgeous. I struggled to adjust to the cast changes and what I perceived as tonal changes, but by the time Aang was soaring around and having a good time, so was I. I had missed him, and it was good to spend time with him again. If anything, Paramount’s bungling of this whole debacle means that it’s unlikely that we’ll get the opportunity again (unless you count the Netflix live action series, which has its own host of problems). Only time will tell. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Hardest Working Prop in Hollywood

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Until 1956’s Forbidden Planet screened at The Prytania last week, I had only ever watched it as a VHS tape, fuzzed out and color-faded on a squared-off TV screen. It’s easy to take the movie for granted as an Atomic Age sci-fi novelty in that format, where it resembles any number of 1950s space adventures of the Buck Rogers mold. Revisiting it in CinemaScope on the big screen painted a much clearer picture of just how extravagant its production was for that genre. If anything, Forbidden Planet is the Atomic Age sci-fi novelty. Between its flying saucers, laser battles, psychic monsters, synthesizers, mini-skirted alien babes, and Mid-Century Modern decor, it stands as the Platonic ideal of Atomic Age sci-fi, a perfect specimen. Its influence on all space-adventure sci-fi to follow is also glaringly apparent in retrospect. Within the first five minutes, the Earthling astronaut heroes step into a light-beam transporter device that looks suspiciously like the ones on Star Trek; the yellow text scroll of its original trailer looks suspiciously like the opening prologues of classic Star Wars films. Not for nothing, composers Bebe & Louis Barron’s far-out analog synth soundtrack is also cited as the first feature-length electronic score in movie history, overloaded with futuristic beep-boop sounds that would change the shape of music forever, in cinema and beyond. I was delighted by the Barrons’ opening credit for “electronic tonalities,” since what they were doing with their self-invented gadgetry was so experimental the studio unions weren’t convinced it technically qualified as music. I was even more delighted by the similar credit “introducing Robby the Robot” in that sequence, though, as if Forbidden Planet‘s breakout robo-star was a working actor instead of a movie prop.

Robby the Robot should be familiar to any movie lover regardless of their personal interest in Atomic Age sci-fi or whether they know Robby by name. His image is synonymous with the genre, to the point where he earned the nickname “the hardest working robot in Hollywood” for how often he was referenced in other works. Robby has dozens of acting credits on IMDb, ranging from speaking roles in vintage TV shows like Lost in Space, Twilight Zone, and Columbo to uncredited background cameos in Gremlins, Explorers, Looney Tunes: Back in Action, and even a few movies not directed by Joe Dante. His continued popularity after his “introduction” in Forbidden Planet was at least partly genuine, since he is an instant charmer in that big screen debut. Robby was introduced to audiences as a kind of robot butler & 3D printer, always available to serve cocktails and fabricate gem-studded haute couture gowns at the simplest request. His flat vocal affect (provided by actual-human actor Marvin Miller) and his overly buff body design also made him an oddly manly screen presence, so bulkily muscular that he had to toddle across the screen like a baby taking its first steps. A lot of Robby’s continued public circulation after Forbidden Planet was an effort from MGM to recoup a return on investment, though, since his construction for his introductory film appearance was exorbitantly expensive, estimated at nearly 7% of the film’s overall budget. That money was put to great use, affording Forbidden Planet a recognizable mascot that could sell tickets with his coneheaded good looks and dry robotic wit, but it was a huge gamble to invest so much of the special effects budget on a single prop. The only way to justify the expense, really, was to put the robot to work.

Without question, the most bizarre ploy to squeeze more return on investment out of Robby’s robo-body came the immediate year after Forbidden Planet, when the sci-fi mascot was once again billed as a big-name actor in the children’s comedy The Invisible Boy. Robby’s second acting credit only does the bare minimum to justify the logic of his screen presence, gesturing towards an offscreen time travel device that connects its 1950s suburbia setting to a future century when Robby could’ve conceivably traveled to Earth after the events of Forbidden Planet. All of this half-baked lore is effectively contained to a single postcard, briefly discussed by the father-son duo who hog most of the runtime. Personally, I prefer to take the opening credits at face value, agreeing to a reality where Robby is a working actor whose appearance onscreen doesn’t need to be narratively justified any more than his human costars’. The important thing is that Robby is given the opportunity to make friends with a young nerd in the American suburbs, offering some direct-to-consumer wish fulfillment for the target audience of sci-fi adventures like Forbidden Planet. Then, a dirty Commie supercomputer hijacks Robby’s programming, temporarily turning him evil and overriding his prime objective to do no harm to living beings. He gets up to increasingly ridiculous, nefarious deeds in his second outing: turning the young boy invisible, kidnapping him to the moon, and getting hit with a military-grade flamethrower for his troubles. Then, he finally snaps out of it and becomes the Robby we all know & love in the final scene. All’s well that ends well, I guess, as long as you don’t pay too much attention to the Father Knows Best familial dynamics that continue in the subtly abusive family home Robby invades, in which spankings are frequent and other expressions of parental affection are difficult to come by.

The Invisible Boy is kiddie stuff, but it’s at least memorably deranged kiddie stuff. There’s a brief comedic sequence after Robby first turns his young friend invisible that threatens to run out the rest of the runtime with slapstick hijinks (again, mostly involving unseen spankings). Instead, the movie gets admirably bizarre in its scene-to-scene plotting, diverting attention from Robby’s new homelife to the evil machinations of a treasonous supercomputer, hellbent on ruling the world in an AI takeover by hypnotizing the humans at its controls. That computer is about the size of an average home’s living room, but it’s said to contain the sum total of human knowledge in its memory banks the same way the cavernous underground computers in Forbidden Planet were explained to contain the sum total of space-alien Krell knowledge. Any of The Invisible Boy‘s direct connections to Forbidden Planet could only diminish it in comparison, though, since that bigger-budgeted work was set entirely in a sound stage otherworld (the first of its kind in that regard as well), while the action sequences of its kinda-sorta follow-up mostly amount to military goons firing blanks at its most expensive prop in an open, barren field. Whenever Robby’s not onscreen in The Invisible Boy, the audience is asking, “Where’s Robby?,” whereas he’s just one of many wonders in Forbidden Planet, competing with flying saucers, psychic monsters, and laser battles for the audience’s attention. It sure is fun to imagine what life would be like with Robby hanging around as your big, buff robo-butler as a child, though, which makes the overall appeal of The Invisible Boy immediately apparent. We all wish we could spend more quality time with our good friend Robby, which is partly why he has never truly gone away. He’s always hanging around in the background somewhere, chilling and collecting royalty checks from past acting gigs.

-Brandon Ledet